The President of the Small-Scale Miners Association, Michael Kwadwo Peprah, has narrated the events that led to the arrest of illegal mining (‘galamsey’) ‘queen’, Aisha Huang.
According to him, the landlord of the ‘galamsey’ queen blew her cover to the police in Accra which means that she was not traced by the Ghana Immigration Service as being asserted.
Kwadwo Peprah explained that the landlord reported her because she had threatened to harm him after finding out the apartment she used to occupy before her deportation, had been rented out on her return.
“When Miss Huang was deported, the landlord secured a court order and removed her belongings from the house and rented it to another Chinese national who also sells ‘galamsey’ equipment.
“On her return to Ghana, she saw another person in the apartment. She felt cheated and was requesting for the balance of the rent she paid. She went to threaten the Chinese tenant who was staying in the apartment.
“The fear of what Aisha Huang might do to them is what led to the Chinese tenant and the landlord coming to Accra to report her which eventually lead to her arrest,” he said in twi in an Adom News interview.
He added that the miners knew Aisha was in the country but did not report her because they know that she has connections to very powerful people in government.
Meanwhile, the Ghana Immigration Service has denied that Huang had been in the country for more than three months as reported by some media outlets.
According to the Director of public relations of the GIS, Supt Amoako-Atta, the ‘galamsey’ queen was picked up after some intelligence operation by its outfit even though she managed to enter the country without being detected.
“The information I have from our officers is not the three months that you are talking about. By mid-August and second September, she was intercepted by our officers… when it comes to the borders, we have not hidden the fact that our borders are porous, especially in the sub-region and it is not peculiar to the West Africa sub-region alone but across the world,” he added.
